They were not alone in this offensive course: the officers and agents of the Royal Government were equally ostentatious in display and manner of living, and the exasperating snobbishness spread to the magistrates, lawyers, clerks of court, and tax gatherers, who demanded exorbitant fees for their services. The clergymen of the Established Church became oppressive in their exactions, and, as we have stated, society itself was threatened with revolution before the rattle of musketry at Bunker Hill "was heard around the world."
Petitions were sent to the Legislature for relief by the suffering citizens, who were in much the same distressing situation in which Ireland has been many a time since. These prayers were treated with indifference or open contempt, for there are none more reckless and blind than those who are traveling close to the edge of the political volcano rumbling at their feet.
There is a limit beyond which it is always dangerous to tempt the endurance of a people, who now began meeting together, and formed themselves into associations for correcting the evils around them. It was these people who received the name of "Regulators," and who helped to increase the disturbances in that particular section of the country. They deliberately decided "to pay only such taxes as were agreeable to law, and applied to the purpose therein named, and to pay no officer more than his legal fees."
The history of the State records many acts of violence which were inevitable from this condition of affairs. The final collision between the "Regulators" and a strong force of the royal governor Tryon at Alamanance, in which the rebels were badly defeated, occurred in May, 1771, but the disturbances continued with more or less violence until the breaking out of the Revolution, when the mills of God ground so "exceeding fine," that the grievances were removed forever.
It was in such a community as this that Daniel Boone lived, and he and his family were sufferers. What more natural than that he should cast his eyes longingly toward the West, where, though there might be wild beasts and wild men, he and his loved ones could be free from the exasperating annoyances which were all around them?
The perils from Indians were much less alarming to them than were those of the tax-gatherer. Indeed, in all probability, it lent an additional attractiveness to the vast expanse of virgin wilderness, with its splashing streams, its rich soil, its abundance of game and all that is so enchanting to the real sportsman, who finds an additional charm in the knowledge that the pleasure upon which he proposes to enter is spiced with personal danger.
One day a visitor dropped in upon Boone. He was John Finley, who led a party of hunters to the region adjoining the Louisa River in Kentucky in the winter of 1767, where they spent the season in hunting and trapping. The hunter called upon Boone to tell him about that land in which he knew his friend was so much interested.
We can imagine the young man, with his rifle suspended on the deer-prongs over the fire, with his wife busy about her household duties and his children at play, sitting in his cabin and listening to the glowing narrative of one who knew whereof he was speaking.
Finley told him of the innumerable game, the deer and bison, the myriads of wild turkeys, and everything so highly prized by the sportsman; he pictured the vast stretches of forest in which the hunter could wander for hours and days without striking a clearing; of the numerous streams, some large, some small, and all lovely to the eye, and it needed no very far-seeing vision to forecast the magnificent future which lay before this highly favored region.
It must have been a winsome picture drawn by Finley—aided as it was by the repelling coloring of the scene of his actual surroundings—made so hateful by the oppressive agents of the foreign government which claimed the colonies as her own.